It’s coming up at that time of the year again and we wanted to let you know that the Fandom Snowflake Challenge will be happening again in January. We are very excited about hosting another round! To make the upcoming round as awesome as it can possibly be we are looking for volunteers to help us out! Here are the details on what the requirements and expectations of volunteer mods are for you to consider.

Requirements and Expectation of Volunteer Mods

General Volunteer Requirements:

All volunteers will have the opportunity to help us mold the challenges by helping come up with what challenges we offer and when we offer them.

Volunteers must be willing to interact with a lot of people who have different interests and levels than you and some of them, you might be the only interaction they receive. You must be able to offer support and encouragement or alert other mods to the need.

We have 4 levels of involvement that can fit most people's availability.

1) Poster and First Comment Responder

2) Comment Responder

3) Other Site Organizer

4) Graphics

Poster: We have 19 posts scheduled (15 challenges, one introduction, one meet the mods, one wrap up post and the friending meme.) You can sign up for only one if you'd like, or more if you're able.

Responsibility of Poster: create the post using the template provided. Seek feedback if you'd like. Post into the community, and then notify us in the mod community so we all know it's there. Then you are the first responder to that post. You don't have to answer every comment or read every post after. But you'll be the one getting the notifications as the challenge progresses so you'll have the sole responsibility of cheering on the stragglers.

Second Responder, Third and (hopefully) Fourth Responder Responsibilities:

✔️Help poster respond to comments on the community post (we get an average of 150 participants per challenge)

✔️Take turns commenting on each post of our participants.

✔️Communicate with other volunteers throughout the month.

Other Site Organizers Requirements:

We need volunteers familiar with other fandom spaces that aren't Dreamwidth if we want to have a presence in these spaces. This will require adapt each Dreamwidth post to making a post on your site, which may include fixing links, removing or altering HTML, sharing a small quote and linking to the Dreamwidth post, tagging appropriately, and/or removing or altering images to your site's specifications. You should be prepared to post the above 19 posts listed under Dreamwidth Poster and you should also be prepared to make additional posts as needed on your site to share any applicable graphics, share your site specific tags, or otherwise interact with your site participants.

Depending on your site, you may need to keep track of a tag, reply to comments on your post, keep track of reblogs, keep track of direct messages, or otherwise monitor your site for participant entries. You need to interact with participant entries in some way, such as commenting, reblogging, Liking, or whatever is possible on your site. Ideally, each site should have an additional volunteer (or volunteers) to help with posting and commenting on your site which might involve creating site specific templates, communicating outside of the Dreamwidth mods community, and other mod duties (like answering asks, checking an inbox, or maintaining a community.

Graphics:

We'd love to have someone with graphic abilities to help us create some banners and icons. Only requirement other than making awesome pretties is to supply the coding needed to post it.

It really is a lot of fun, made more so by the inclusion to as many people from as many fandoms and spaces as possible.

ozma914

Happy no-longer Halloween, everyone!

We had a successful talk at the Community Learning Center in Kendallville Thursday, once I got over being intimidated by the size of the room.

I mean, they put us on an actual stage, and handed us microphones. Two dozen people were there; we sold eleven books, and signed two others that had been previously purchased. That's pretty good, when you consider they had to pay $15 to get in.

That makes two live presentations, a book signing, a radio station interview, a TV interview, and a podcast, and we're exhausted. Emily and I are what people now call introverts: When we're out in public, especially when attention is on us, it drains our batteries. It didn't help that we had to fight off a cold during this period.

And yet it's good for us to get out, and we've made sales. We even got a sale from out of the area after our radio interview with Jack Hammer, at WXKE.

I'm not that good at public speaking, but I think I held my own.

I expect sales of Haunted Noble County, Indiana to drop now that the spooky season is over. Sadly, I don't have books named Thanksgiving In Indiana or A Hoosier Christmas, but it is that time of year when I try to push book sales for gift giving season. The number of authors who never have to worry about promotion is probably in the low three digits, these days.

On a related note, if you've ever bought any of our books, please leave a review! Amazon only allows reviews from people with an account who've spent $50 in the last year, but the book does not have to be purchased there. Goodreads is good, too. It's in the name.

You can't imagine how important reviews are to the success of a book. It doesn't have to be something long and complicated.

So, what's next? I mean after recovery, because being out in the cold and various allergens has left us sniffling and exhausted. Next step for me is to start working again on the Hoosier Hysterical sequel. We want it to come out early next year in honor of America's Semiquincentennial, which is a real word, I think. I should probably just call it our 250th birthday.

Meanwhile, Emily is going to reformat and make a new cover for Radio Red, which we're re-releasing after getting the rights back from the original publisher. It's a fun romantic comedy set in Michigan, and I think people will like it. Sadly, very little was done to promote it earlier.

Then we have to finish the Albion Fire Department photo book (send pictures!), publish a Storm Chaser prequel, continue submitting half a dozen finished manuscripts to publishers and agents, and write more. Granted, writing is not a spectator sport, but for us it's an exciting time coming up.

Even introverts can be extroverted on the internet:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Book sales are how we afford caffeinated beverages, and we’d be no fun without them.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: on stage

jedibuttercup

T; Tin Man [2007]; DG/Wyatt Cain, 6700 words. Post-canon soulmates AU.

It was like the Quest had never ended at all; DG had just run out of signposts to follow. Well, except maybe one....

Heart's Got Everything to Do With It

(For

anr in

rarepairexchange)

jedibuttercup

M; Dredd [2012]; Anderson/Dredd, 5100 words. Post-canon, natural disaster fic.

"Anderson to Sector 112 Control," Cassandra reported, comm raised to her mouth as she sheltered behind the towering concrete wall of a mega-highway support. "It's getting difficult to make headway out here. What's the status on Weather Control repair?"

Finding Order in the Chaos

(For

anr in

rarepairexchange)

snickfic

stripysock, in response to the photo below: This must surely be the most satisfying fandom you've ever been in, for real time live content

me: Yes. I will never have it this good again.

Black and white photo of Liam tenderly kissing the back of Noel's neck, while Noel smiles to himself, with evident laugh lines at the corner of his eye

This is from their official socials, by the way.

ozma914

A quick note before the attempted entertainment begins: For those thinking about going to our author appearance on October 30 in Kendallville, we're dropping the price of Haunted Noble County, Indiana bought from us there by two dollars. Our reasoning is that since you have to sign up and there's a $15 ticket price, we should offer a deal. Here's all the info, along with the signup link:

https://commevents.eventcalendarapp.com/haunted-noble-county

****************************

So, do you kids want to hear a scary story?

"Yay!"

I grew up in a dark, backward land called No Electronics.

"That is scary!"

I know.

Every generation has some version of this story. Not only that, but every generation sees so much technological advancement that the story can change depending on their desire to impress the listener. I once rented a VCR from a video store, to hook up to my first color television; but it's much more impressive to talk about my childhood black and white console TV, which brought in 3-6 channels depending on how willing you were to go outside and turn the antenna.

What's the big deal about this car? It was the first automobile in the town of Albion.

We once pulled in a Chicago TV station, which was playing old black and white westerns. The pictures were snowy and the volume barely audible, but we watched anyway, because at that moment our only other choices were The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, or Dialing For Dollars.

I'll explain that last one some other time.

My grandmother told stories about her family's mules. To me the idea of no indoor plumbing or electricity is just as fascinating as the day I showed my youngest daughter the manual typewriter I spent my first ten years writing on.

After I explained how it operated, she looked it over carefully and asked, "But where's the power cord?"

You want portable entertainment? Here's the Albion Library's bookmobile.

My parents once listened to their favorite shows on the radio. "The Lone Ranger", "Fibber McGee and Molly", and of course "My Favorite Husband", which later morphed into the TV show "I Love Lucy". My question: What the heck did they look at while the show was playing? The wall? Certainly not each other?

Kids, when I was your age and I missed my favorite TV show, I wouldn't have another chance to watch that episode until it was rerun in the summer.

"But why didn't you record it?"

We did once record an episode of "Superman"--on reel to reel audio tape. When I was thirty I bought a video camera, to record the kids and their activities. Now we whip out our cell phones.

It's Albion's phone service, circa the turn of the century. No, the PREVIOUS century. Not a Bluetooth or USB port to be seen. (Our original Bell Telephone office still stands, about two blocks from my home.)

It makes me wonder what stories my kids will tell their grandkids, someday.

"When I was your age, I couldn't just touch my earbud and have my shows downloaded directly to my brain. I had to actually turn on the TV and bring up the DVR!"

"What's a DVR?"

My kids won't be able to tell the story of how they walked to school a mile every day, uphill both ways, through snow in the morning and a heat wave every afternoon. They'll be asked for video proof. By the time my great-grandchildren are putting on their radiation suits for the hover-car trip to sky-school, they'll be automatically recording from the moment they wake up.

They'll have proof that the good old days weren't all that good.

Go ahead, find the electronics section in this Albion store. I'll wait.

As for me, somewhere around the house I have vinyl records, cassette tapes, CD-Rom discs, and that old VHS camcorder ... and a laptop, podcasts on my cell phone, and a car that talks to my phone as soon as I turn the key. Not that new cars need keys.

The changes come so fast that looking back can make a person both nostalgic and dizzy.

I'm so old, some of my books are already ... history. The photos on this blog came from my research for Images of America: Albion and Noble County.

Follow us for history, humor, romance, or general fun, guaranteed or we’ll be really sorry:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Print books don’t need electricity, but be careful with the candles.

snickfic

Battle Royale (2000). A high school class is selected to murder each other in a game of survival until the last one wins. I can definitely see the comparisons to The Hunger Games, not just in the general concept but some of the specific mechanics, like having the island being broken up into zones that occasionally become "dangerous" and the updates over speakers throughout the island.

Overall, this was fine? The friend I went with said it was much funnier in Japanese. I thought our main two characters were pretty but dull, and I was much more interested in the take-no-prisoners girl with the makeup and the guy with the bandana, who it turns out is a survivor of a previous game. I wanted more of them.

--

Crooked House (2017). An adaptation of a Christie novel about a PI asked by an old flame to investigate the death of a family patriarch, who might have been killed by any number of his live-in children and attached family members, who all hate him and each other.

The cast here is stacked: Glenn Close, Gillian Anderson, Julian Sands, Christina Hendricks. The family is moderately terrible, although not as extravagantly as one would hope, and not nearly enough time is spent on them. Instead we spend way too much time with the PI and his relationship with the old flame, and I truly cannot tell you how little I cared about him or them together! Stop this dumb romantic tension and take me back to the family full of character actors!

Even aside from that problem, the movie dragged in places and felt poorly paced. It was even worse because this is one of the very few Christie novels whose endings I still remember, so I didn't even get any suspense.

--

Frankenstein (2025). A doctor is determined to defeat death and goes to monstrous lengths to do so.

The picture you have in your head of what Del Toro doing Frankenstein looks like is pretty much what this movie is. It's beautiful, gothic, indulgent, and there's a sympathetic monster. There aren't any surprises, IMO. This feels like Del Toro playing it very safe, and I would rank it as mid-tier Del Toro. It also feels like it borrows heavily from Crimson Peak, especially visually, although weirdly enough I find that one much more horrific on several axes than I do this one.

I do think it shows a Robert Eggers influence; I don't think we get precisely this film without almost a decade of Eggers preceding it.

I was not as into Jacob Elordi as I wanted to be. The creature's design/makeup/prosthetics never stopped feeling fake to me, and I'm a lot less interested in childlike innocence than Del Toro is. OTOH Oscar Isaac was great, and to my surprise I actually preferred the early half of the movie focused on him the best, especially since it also featured most of the really dramatic visuals.

Overall: meh.

snickfic

In late 2019, I:
- Watched Todd in the Shadows's video on Be Here Now
- Fell in love with "D'You Know What I Mean," opening track of Be Here Now, and listened to it about fifty times via the Youtube music video (you know the one, with the actualfax helicopters)
- Found Cerberusia's Yuletide prompt for Oasis omegaverse
- Listened to their first two albums. I liked the second album a little better, and on the second or third loop of it playing on Youtube in the background (because I hadn't even subscribed to Tidal yet), I went hey, this song's neat, I wonder what it's called? Friends, it was Wonderwall.
- Watched Supersonic, their two-hour documentary/extremely high-end marketing film.
- Watched a bunch of archive interviews on Youtube, read a bunch more. Fell alllllll the way down the rabbit hole. Collected all the links in a giant word doc that I maintain to this day and which formed the basis of the primer I posted a few months later.
- Wrote 5k of Oasis omegaverse porn. (Got an approving comment on it from one of the OG omegaverse writers!!)

Six years!! I can't believe all that's happened since. 2019 was the absolute nadir of their relationship, and now they hug on stage every night while grinning at each other like soppy adoring idiots. (You see what I mean.) I've written almost 120k of fic and stuck around more or less continuously for longer than I've been in any other fandom. I've seen Liam solo three times, Noel once, and Oasis twice. These gigs have taken me to London, Manchester, and Dublin (twice), after only having been to Europe once before, and have led me to meeting up with a bunch of friends while overseas, some for the first time IRL. After first seeing Liam in 2022, I also started going to see other live music, and some special favorites have been Garbage, Lord Huron, and Saint Motel.

Meanwhile the world in general and I personally have gone through a lot of shit that continues unabated. It's been a very long six years.

The weather here has turned wet and cold, just as it was when I first listened to What's the Story Morning Glory on repeat in 2019. I put the album on in car this weekend, and the big wailing guitars and Liam's voice, helped along by the same grim autumn weather in which I first heard these songs, took me straight back to that original thrill of discovery.

We take our joy where we find it. I have found a lot of mine the past few years in this band and especially these two guys.

snickfic

+ Random icon generator knows what it's about!!

+ For Yuletide I got brave and offered a canon I've been wanting to write for a while, as well as a variety of other goodies. A lot of things I haven't offered before. Shaking things up! However, some of the noms I was especially excited about in the tagset didn't get requested, whomp whomp.

+ I knew not many people saw Red Sonja, but I didn't realize it was a "0 Yuletide offers and the only request is mine" number of people. :(

+ I got an extension on the bulk of my FIAB assignment and swapped part of the remaining for a pinch hit, and they're both due next weekend. I'm over halfway to the minimum on the longer fic (but probably not halfway through the story lolsob) and have a start on the shorter fic. Point being: this weekend I have got to make some words. Overall I have about 5500 words towards my 10k goal, which feels... not terrible, all things considered.

+ Today I'm driving up to the city to see Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein! Exciting!! Del Toro should always be seen on the big screen, and also I'm very into Jacob Elordi and cannot wait to see what del Toro does with him as the sympathetic monster. I wish Netflix was giving it a wider release. There are only two theaters in my entire region showing it. >:(

+ After a month's break, Oasis are in the middle of their very short leg in Asia. They continue to be having a grand old time, it seems. Some evidence:
- Walk-on in Tokyo. So much to say that they're still saying it while literally walking on stage with their hands joined!
- Has anyone ever been as obsessed with their sibling's ass as Liam is with Noel's?
- And he thinks we all should be obsessed with it too! Especially notable because, like, it's barely there. A nearly non-existent ass. Noel Gallagher must sit on SOMETHING but...

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

On All My Motions

“All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” – C.S. Lewis

Reading

Call for Volunteers 2026

Requirements and Expectation of Volunteer Mods

An Active Author's Autumn

Fic: Heart's Got Everything to Do With It [T; Tin Man; DG/Cain]

Fic: Finding Order in the Chaos [M; Dredd; Anderson/Dredd]

beyond my wildest dreams

No Electronics: Stories To Scare Your Grandkids

movies!

an Oasis anniversary post

fannish stuff

Database maintenance